1. Advanced Portfolio: Evaluation Taran Draycott

2. For my project I worked in a group of two which consisted Alex Holden and myself. For the brief we were told that we would have to create a Music Video. Initially we planned to use the band that Alex was a member of alongside his twin brother and his cousin but with restrictions on time available to record the songs within college we wouldn’t have been able to produce a track in time to fit with the deadline. Luckily Alex was able to contact his older cousin who is part of a band currently in America, The King Cheetah, we gained permission to use their, quite upbeat track, ‘Squaddie Meat’ with relative ease. It matched perfectly with any research we had done and linked to our chosen genre of ‘Punk’ perfectly. Click one the images below to be sent to their website.

4. Editing uses cuts between both locations and make for a fast paced video.

6. ‘The shots and editing used were similar of the typical Punk video, so it would likely be shown.’

8. ‘They weren’t to my musical taste, but if they were, from the video and the catchiness of the video, I would.’

10. How did you use media technologies in the construction of your products? Before we could start to actually put together our video we had to get the footage recorded, and for that we used the video cameras supplied to us by college, and for any stills we used either our phones or we borrowed our friends camera. For example the locations shots needed to be in high quality so we used our friends professional camera. When we were creating our video we were instructed to use Final Cut Express by our Media technicians as they pointed out that it was a lot more advanced than iMovie which we had used previously. After being taught to use it and by following tips we had been given we started to build our video. We desaturated the majority of the performance footage to get rid of the ‘bright’ look of the music recording studio in our college and give it a slightly more ‘Punk’ image with the dark that was created. A lot of the software proved to be hard to use without practice and only after extensive use, and multiple crashes did we get the hang of it. Using the programs we were recommended and the equipment supplied to us I believe our product has been made to look as realistic as possible, and our Audience feedback reflects that.

11. How did you use media technologies in the research and planning stages of your project? Throughout our research we spent a lot of time on the video sharing site ‘Youtube’ to look for videos similar to what we were aiming to achieve and posting the on our college ‘Blogger’ account so we could refer back to them at a later date. These included several videos from the band Green Day and one of ‘Red Flag’ by Billy Talent. We also spent a bit of time browsing the music sections of several social networking sites such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Myspace’. We also spent quite a lot of time researching other band’s magazine adverts and CD covers, we found that the two bands we researched into for the videos, Green Day and Billy Talent, were going to be very useful. Both used very plain colours of Black, Red, and White that are similar to most punk band’s advertising campaigns which is the reason we chose to use these colours as the basis for our ancillaries.

12. Overall Conclusion of Evaluation In conclusion of the evaluation I feel that the extent to which we researched to being with was a major factor in the product we created as without spotting the similarities between two quite well known Punk bands our products may have had no clear patterns to follow or adapt to unless we made them up ourselves. The planning of the product against the research we did obviously helped us to get it as close to the ‘real deal’ as we could and from our audience feedback I believe our product comes quite close to that. With our ancillaries being less worked on than our video they were not what I expected when we first planned. With lack of time and resources we ended up without feedback on our ancillaries but overall I was pleased with them. The strengths of it are that we stuck to our colour scheme and it worked quite well to the extent of putting across the image that was needed. The weaknesses however come with the lack of software on my home computer, without Photoshop I was forced to use other less advanced programs and the quality was not what we had hoped for. The brand image was still there but not as well as we had hoped, and would maybe not stick in the mind of the audience as much as we’d hoped. On the topic of my own contribution I believe I put a fair amount of effort into the project seeing as Alex and I both had a lot more to do as a group of two. I believe we handled the workload to the best of our abilities and that our products are created to a standard that we hope would be authentic enough to be used if the project was meant for a real world band. Sayonara!